National treasure

A baseball team from the nation's capital is in the World Series for the first time since 1933, and once again the leather-bound history of America's Passed-Time Pastime is on full display. No other sport in this country carries the weight of its history, tying together as it does soldiers in the Civil War scurrying to first base after putting a bat on a ball, and young men who were born more than 125 years later doing the same thing last night.

And so there will be all these retrospectives on the dear departed Washington Senators in the coming days, and how they were hopeless stumblebums for most of their decades. Walter Johnson, the truest immortal in the Senators' history, will be summoned from his long eternal sleep. People will talk about 1924, the only time the Senators ever won a World Series, and of course 1933.

When the Senators naturally got smoked in the World Series by Carl Hubbell and the Giants, four games to one.

These Nationals ancestors to those Senators have a whole fistful of Hubbells to throw at opposing hitters, which is largely why they're going to the World Series. Nuclear bats may rule the long summer, but nuclear arms rule the fall. The St. Louis Cardinals mustered all of six runs against the likes of Strasburg and Scherzer and Sanchez and Corbin, and they got four of them in their 7-4 loss in Game 4. Everything else was crickets.

The TV suits will hate the Nats being in the Series, especially if the Astros manage to knock out those pinstriped happy orifices from the Bronx. Cardinals-Yankees would have made them all richer, ratings-wise. But it wouldn't have been nearly as compelling as Washington vs. whoever for the first time since FDR, Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde.

Plus, it's a much more endearing storyline. Forsaken by their superstar (Bryce Harper) for filthy lucre, the Nationals effectively said, "Yeah? Well, who needs ya, ya bum? Watch this."

You gotta love that. Even if the suits won't.

But to hell with em. Let 'em eat their Nielsens.